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Modern OSX Floppy Drive Format

macuserman

Well-known member
I picked up a cheap usb floppy drive that was Mac compatible in the hopes that I would be able to copy data directly to floppy from my modern Mac currently running Monterey from the internet to be loaded onto my older machines and skip a few steps in the way. However as I’m sure that many of you probably guessed while the floppy drive shows up when I pop in a floppy disk it wants me to initialize it. Is there any kind of extension if you will that would allow me to read and write to a format supported by my old machines? I can always burn a cd but it’s not always the best option. Thoughts?13A849F3-F0E9-407D-9CFA-7634302536C5.jpeg
 

3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
What "Generation" of Macs are you looking to use this on? If they're running 8.1 or above you should just be able to use OS X Extended, but I'm guessing your looking at System 7. I've heard of passing through hardware to Mini vMac before, maybe try starting there and formatting a disk?
 

macuserman

Well-known member
I’d be fine with anything that will work on os 8.6-9.2 hfs??? But that seems to have been removed quite a few versions of OSX back just wondering if there is a way to add back support I guess.
 

3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
Admittedly I can't do much testing since my USB floppy drive quit working a few months ago (argh), but I can still format a flash drive as OSX Extended (Journaled) and it will read just fine on my iMac G3 running 9.2. (Formatted on Catalina)
 

nickpunt

Well-known member
Running Leopard in a VM and then assigning USB devices to that is how I get data on/off of a modern Mac.
 

macuserman

Well-known member
Ah now that’s the kind of solution I was hoping for leaopard in a vm might be just the ticket. I mean it would be nicer if there was a way to just add thr support back in but that sounds like a workable solution. Esp since I don’t just want to make disks from online content I also would like to archive and make backups of old original disks.
 

chillin

Well-known member
I mean it would be nicer if there was a way to just add thr support back in but that sounds like a workable solution.

I didn't realize it at first, but there is. Here is a recipe.

First, you have to have or get a free Apple Developer account.

Then download and install XCode from developer.apple.com (Monterey can run XCode 13.1 & 13.2, and probably recent earlier versions as well)

Then install MacPorts, instructions here: https://www.macports.org/install.php

You'll want to add macports to your $PATH & $MANPATH, instructions here: https://guide.macports.org/chunked/installing.shell.html
(I like to keep those export commands in my ~/.bash_profile for easy future migration)


Then install hfsutils thusly
sudo port -vsN install hfsutils

and I would start with
man hmount

and
Really old project, but apparently it still works, at least I just built it on Mojave, so it must somehow not be 32-bit when built for x86_64, and I have to assume it will even build on M1. But I don't have any HFS partition to mount to test further.
 
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macuserman

Well-known member
@chillin Yep I just tried your method on Monteray on my 2014 mini and it worked perfect. I'll confess I'm not really handy with command line stuff but it does seem to be accessing the floppy discs. I'll have to play with it a bit more before I am confident to read original disks for archiving. Also setting up a Leopard VM as well because why not there is a free version of VMware now called player so seems like it would be a fun way to try it out.
 

chillin

Well-known member
Hey, congrats macuserman. That is excellent. MacPorts is good stuff, and now you have easy access to build and install qemu (which, among many other OS, can also run Leopard btw https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10784 ), various minivmac emulators (another method to hfs mentioned above), MAME (so very awesome), gimp. ffmpeg, MPlayer, ImageMagick,, wget, youtube-dl, iftop, nmap, pdftk, neofetch, and thousands of other useful and essential ports.

Maybe Leopard isn't the most ideal for just hfs purposes. Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger also sees hfs, and has decent 68k & PPC emulation for Mac OS 9,8,7,6 etc. Also, Tiger is has a considerably smaller footprint than Leopard. I just focused on Leopard because it was the last to support HFS. (for qemu Tiger https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/63b2914711f9ee32053d3c1f48d5c89a tho VMWare player is probably easier than qemu , which requires a lot of command line )
 
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mg.man

Well-known member
Hmm... a bit tangential... but might this work to get a USB Zip drive working on a more modern mac OS?
 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
We're getting to the point where having one or more bridge is more and more important. Strategizing on what those bridges are can help reduce how many of them there are and how well things work. This applies whether you're doing networking or physical media.

It was mentioned but just as a reminder, 8.6 and 9 can use HFS+ and I believe they can even format floppy diskettes that way. macOS Monterey also still speaks HFS+. Neither OS needs anything extra to get to that point.

If HFS works with a floppy drive it will with a Zip drive. Zip drives themselves work unassisted in the newest OSes and the only assistance you really need to use Floppy/Zip/MO/MD-DATA/Jaz/Orb/SyJet/literally-USB-sticks to transfer data is that both OSes involved need to speak a common filesystem.

If your systems (or one of your bridge machines) have USB, they'll be running 8.1 or newer and can use HFS+ -- just format your data transfer device with HFS+.

While you're at it -- if you have USB: you can skip Zip. USB sticks, USB pocket hard disks, and SD/CF card readers all work great under OS 9. Just format the device under 9 as HFS+ and keep it under 2TB. (Also if your Mac has USB there's a really great chance it's fast enough to just run 9.1 or 9.2.1-9.2.2.) (I know lots of people like it and we're all mostly here to huff vibes so if those are vibes you want to huff -- have at, just, you don't have to use Zip.)


Virtualization and emulation are great tools. QEMU-PPC runs Mac OS 9.2.2 remarkably well on fairly modest PC hardware. It feels/works about as fast as a G3/300 in most stuff on a CPU like the i5-2400. Low-watt/T-series desktops, laptops, and mac mini CPUs are similarly decent at it, mostly because 9 is so lightweight.

QEMU-PPC runs OS X 10.4, but poorly in my experience. Some things outright fail because lots of what OS X needs over 9, QEMU-PPC is poor at. (You'd notice this under 9 as well if you were using it for things like software development, video/3d rendering, etc)

Fortunately, on Intel-based Macs and PCs -- VMware Workstation/Player run the Intel version of 10.4 and 10.5 great and aside from a couple missing stairs for certain user-facing productivity software are a great compromise for file handling and transfer needs.

(in VMware, because QEMU networking can be weird) 10.4's built-in file server also works great for connections form any 7.1+ Mac on an '020 or better that can run the updated OpenTransport and AppleShare from 7.5 or newer. Up through Big Sur (as far as I've tested) can also connect to 10.4 file servers, so it's a good tool to have around.

(10.2/3 should do older file sharing clients, but over AppleTalk and on windows QEMU networking doesn't agree that much so I'd say reserve that for if you have a physical PPC Mac you want to run OS X on)

There's also things like A2Server and MacIPGw pi and VM images for appletalk/appleshare connectivity. I don't have those set up but they're typically based on netatalk 2 which works great.
 

chillin

Well-known member
If HFS works with a floppy drive it will with a Zip drive.

I think that is exactly right. From a cursory examination of the hfsutils hmount manual, it's all about partition format; media is irrelevant.

I am considering mucking with free ESXi on a 2012 Mac mini bare iron (dragging feet due to giving up a beautiful console for a stinky web interface), but if one is going to actually purchase a hypervisor, I'd steer new users towards Parallels over VMWare.

The Parallels application support and community support is superb, plus the active Mac-only (or mostly Mac) forums, and Parallels has been around on the platform a lot longer. I'm not sure VMWare does, but Parallels allows choosing the use of their or Apple's builtin Hypervisor. But if familiar with VMWare on Windows, there's nothing wrong with it on Mac.

Oracle was kind of a touch of death for VirtualBox. There was momentum there before Oracle swallowed Sun and plastered their boilerplate all over Sun's work. I don't see many using it anymore.

I am so pleased with the advancement and popularity of qemu, runs all kinds of OS, including System 7 and A/UX (at least there's an alpha version from January, which should have been rolled into current by now... but I can't find any confirmation of this), but it's a lot of command line interface, and learning qemu's way.
 
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